When Howard Schultz embarked on a brand refresh for Starbucks a few years ago, he didn’t make a high-profile change to the logo—he closed all outlets for a few hours so he could coach managers on how to positively change culture at the store level.
Executive Summary
Successful companies are branding from the inside out, says Chromium's Tony Wessling, who explains that this means they are building innovative, responsive cultures that consistently attract and retain both customers and talent. Here, Wessling provides four key principles to build a culture that translates into a successful brand.When Nationwide decided to really live the “On Your Side” tagline, President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Pizzi convened a bureaucracy-busting advisory council of associates so that new ideas for serving policyholders could be aired—ideas that hadn’t been filtered through layers of management.
Zappos’s CEO Tony Hsieh has new hires for every department man the customer service phones for two weeks to gain firsthand experience with customers’ needs.
